Engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and educators across a diverse range of industries solve engineering and scientific problems requiring large complex models using computer applications that provide technical computing environments. One such application which provides a technical computing environment is MATLAB®, a product of The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Mass. MATLAB® is a high performance language and a technical computing application that provides mathematical and graphical tools for mathematical computation, data analysis, visualization and algorithm development. MATLAB® integrates numerical analysis, matrix computation, signal processing, and graphics in an easy-to-use environment where problems and solutions are expressed in familiar mathematical notation, without traditional programming. MATLAB® is used to solve complex engineering and scientific problems by developing mathematical models that simulate the problem. A model is prototyped, tested and analyzed by running the model under multiple boundary conditions, data parameters, or a number of initial guesses.
As a desktop application, MATLAB® allows scientists and engineers to interactively perform complex analysis and modeling in a familiar workstation environment. However, a single workstation can be limiting due to the size of the problem that can be solved because of the relationship of the computing power of the workstation to the computing power necessary to execute computing intensive iterative processing of complex problems in a reasonable time. As problems require larger and more complex modeling, computations become more resource intensive and time-consuming. For example, a simulation of a large complex aircraft model may take a reasonable amount of time to run once with a specified set of parameters. However, the analysis of the problem may also require the model be computed multiple times with a different set of parameters, e.g., at one-hundred different altitude levels and fifty different aircraft weights, to understand the behavior of the model under varied conditions. This would require five-thousand computations to analyze the problem as desired and the single workstation would take an unreasonable or undesirable amount of time to perform these simulations. Therefore, it is desirable to perform a computation concurrently using multiple workstations when the computation becomes so large and complex that it cannot be completed in a reasonable amount of time on a single workstation.
To address this problem of limited computing power being available on individual systems, applications providing technical computing environments that are traditionally used as desktop applications, such as MATLAB®, may be modified to be able to utilize the computing power of concurrent computing, such as parallel computing. One problem of concurrent computing is that the user interface is based on a single instance implementation of the application. That is, the interface, such as the command line, is generic to both a single instanced computing environment and a multiple instanced concurrent computing environment. Thus the same interface is used regardless of the number of computing units being utilized. This makes it difficult to differentiate the concurrent nature and monitor the status of each individual computing unit in the parallel processing environment. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an interface that allows for the differentiating and monitoring of status of computing units in a concurrent processing environment. It would also be desirable to provide an interface that allows a user to target one or more computing units that make up the concurrent computing environment to receive commands.